I’m an author, journalist and one of the UK’s social media pioneers. Here I write about publishing, self-publishing and crowdfunding.
I am also the author of Argleton, a novelette about a mysterious town that appears on digital maps but doesn’t exist in reality. I self-published via Kickstarter and Amazon Kindle, and am negotiating my way through the publishing world and exploring new business models for entrepreneurial authors along the way.
As a freelance journalist, I have written about social media and technology for FirstPost.com, The Guardian, CIO Magazine and Computer Weekly.

UPDATE 22/2/13: Thad McIlroy posted a couple of relevant links in the comments, one from Shelf Awareness, who provide some more details on Codex Group’s report:

After conducting more than 250,000 interviews about reading behavior since 2004, Codex has found that a major shift has taken place in discovery in the past two years, as digital books have become a significant part of the book world.

Two years ago, 35% of book purchases were made because readers found out about a book in bricks-and-mortar bookstores, the single-largest site of discovery. This year, that figure has dropped to 17%, a reflection both of the closing of Borders and the rise of e-readers. In the same period, personal recommendations grew the most, to 22% from 14%. Some three-quarters of personal recommendations are made in person, while the rest come by e-mail (8%), phone (7%), Facebook (4%) and other social networks (3%).

Even though it’s not news that more and more readers are becoming “hybrid” readers, meaning they read and learn about books both online and off, the Codex study shows us that despite the hubbub, digital discovery does not carry as much weight as personal recommendations.

I’d recommend reading both links for more details on the Codex Group report that I, sadly, don’t have access to. They makes for fascinating reading!

It’s well known that book lovers are quite happy to spend time in a bricks-and-mortar bookshop to see what sort of interesting titles they find and then go home to buy on Amazon where the prices are often cheaper. Indeed, it’s been identified as such a significant problem that HarperCollins CEO Victoria Barnsley recently made the interesting suggestion that bookshops ought to charge people to come in and browse, an idea that has had a somewhat chilly reception.

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Self-publishers often think themselves unaffected by ‘planned search and purchase’, not least because for most of us the idea of having our books in a bookshop feels like a distant dream. The assumption that self-publishers work to is that the key to cracking Amazon is to rank highly in their recommendation algorithm and many pixels are spilt by self-publishing bloggers telling us how to do exactly that.

But McCabe’s statistics show that only a piddling 10 percent of Amazon book choices are made because of its ‘bought this/also bought’ recommendation engine. Bestseller and top 100 lists influence 17 percent of book choices, with 12 percent down to promotions, deals, or low prices. Only 3 percent came through browsing categories. Planned search by author or topic, however, makes up a whopping 48 percent of all book choices.

The title of McCabe’s slide is “Amazon – only the end of the funnel, so far?”, and it’s an important point for self-publishers to take to heart. Amazon is a destination for purchase, the place you funnel your fans to, not a discovery mechanism in and of itself. People are simply not browsing for books based on Amazon’s recommendations, not in any significant numbers.

Self-published authors have limited resources for promotion and these figures show that you should focus not on trying to woo Amazon’s algorithm, but on building awareness outside of Amazon. Rather than hoping to gain traction within that 10 percent of people who pay attention to Amazon’s recommendations, or trying to crowbar your title into bestseller or top 100 lists, you should be focusing on building an independent fan base. No one can search for your books if they don’t know you exist.

I’ve written before about how self-publishers, and traditional publishers for that matter, should refocus on direct sales in order to collect valuable customer data. These stats bolster that position — if the majority of Amazon’s sales come from planned search, that indicates a clear intention to buy on the part of the searcher. That intention has been formed outside of Amazon, perhaps due to reviews, social media or word of mouth. And once your readers have formed an intention to buy, you can take action to funnel them to your own shop. For those of a rebellious nature who’d like to give Amazon the two fingers, that’s reassuring.

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I’ve often wondered what the “Make Millions on Kindle” crowd was thinking when they offered 50 ways to get on the top 100 lists. Being on the list is not the cause of arriving there. My recent rise into the top 10 (brief as it might have been) was due to a specific ad that worked.

All the authors I know say the road to success is hand selling to influencers on goodreads and in book clubs.

Thanks for another great article! (BTW: For Americans, “two fingers” is … ?)

Yeah, the problem with the top 100/bestseller lists is that it’s a post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy where people think “because thing B happened after thing A, thing A must have caused thing B”, ie because the book is on a bestseller list, being on the bestseller list must have made it a best seller.

And what the Kindle woo sellers sell is a dream and an easy answer, not reality. That’s mainly because no one likes reality.

Finally, “two fingers” is a rude sign involving making a V of your first and second fingers, palm inwards.

The thing you have to remember about Amazon is that search is its strength. There are two things Amazon does well: Search and the algorithmic surfacing of titles (recommendations, buy x with y pay z, etc).

This means that Amazon’s customer is a search heavy customer. It is a behavior that amazon has trained in to its customers. The truth is Amazon doesn’t offer much in discovery based shopping. Sure you can hunt Top X lists (and many people do) but the retail secret sauce of proper curated decision support is something that eludes them.

Yes, Amazon is strong on search, but the point is that you must have an intention in order to search. So people who are searching Amazon for something have already decided what that thing is. If they are searching for an author, or a specific book, then they have already formed an opinion about that author’s work outside of Amazon.

As for the algorithmic surfacing of titles, the stats show that it doesn’t really matter how good their algorithm is because only 10% of people are paying attention to it. A few more – 17% – look through the Top X and Bestseller lists, but that’s less than half the number of people who are searching for an author or subject.

So if Amazon are about fulfilment, not discovery, then the discovery must happen elsewhere. And when discovery happens off-site, the author/publisher/publicist has an opportunity to divert the sale from Amazon to their own site. And that’s the important bit.

I am totally with you here. When I go to Amazon and look for any title in a certain genre, I rarely find anything I want to buy. When I am looking for a specific author, no matter how obscure, I can find the book every time. Even if the actual book is not available for purchase, as sometimes happens with out-of-print titles.

But when I go to the bookstore, looking for any title in a certain genre, I rarely walk out empty-handed. Amazon has yet to successfully recreate that browsing experience.

My experience is exactly the same, Tia. I’ll often go into a bookshop for one book, and come out with several others as well. That never happens on Amazon! Even with the ‘look inside’ functionality – which isn’t available on all books – I don’t often find something I wasn’t expecting or looking for. To be honest, most of my new author reads now are books from people I’ve ‘met’ on Twitter!

The source of McCabe’s slide is work done by Peter Hildick-Smith at the Codex Group. More info on his data: http://www.mhpbooks.com/online-discovery-not-as-strong-as-in-person-book-recommendations/ http://www.shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=1844#m17713